A Loss Function for Generative Neural Networks Based on Watson's Perceptual Model

To train Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to generate realistic imagery requires a loss function that reflects human perception of image similarity. We propose such a loss function based on Watson's perceptual model, which computes a weighted distance in frequency space and accounts for luminance and contrast masking. We extend the model to color images, increase its robustness to translation by using the Fourier Transform, remove artifacts due to splitting the image into blocks, and make it differentiable. In experiments, VAEs trained with the new loss function generated realistic, high-quality image samples. Compared to using the Euclidean distance and the Structural Similarity Index, the images were less blurry; compared to deep neural network based losses, the new approach required less computational resources and generated images with less artifacts.Comment: Published at the 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020

Experimentelle Untersuchungen zu Veränderungen in Sequenz und/oder Expression des Coxsackievirus-Adenovirus-Rezeptors (CAR) beim Menschen

Coxsackieviren sind kardiotrope Viren aus der Familie der Picornaviridae, die im Verdacht stehen, beim Menschen eine dilatative Kardiomyopathie (DCM) hervorzurufen. Nach derzeitigem Kenntnisstand stellen Coxsackieviren vom Typ B (und hier speziell der Subtyp 3) in mindestens 10–25 % der DCM-Fälle das zugrundeliegende Agens dar. Der primäre Rezeptor für die Erreger auf der Zelloberfläche ist der Coxsackievirus-Adenovirus-Rezeptor (CAR), ein 46-kDa-Protein aus der Immunglobulin-Superfamilie, dessen physiologische Funktion bislang nicht genau definiert werden konnte. Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit war es, diesen Rezeptor in verschiedenen Systemen genauer zu untersuchen und damit einen Beitrag zur Aufklärung seiner Bedeutung im Krankheitsgeschehen und seiner bisher nur unvollständig verstandenen Regulationsmechanismen zu leisten. Es konnte auf RNA- und Proteinebene gezeigt werden, dass CAR bei Patienten mit DCM verstärkt exprimiert wird. Ein ähnlicher Anstieg ließ sich im Herzen CVB3-infizierter BALB/c-Mäuse nachweisen, während die Rezeptor-Expression in Milz und Pankreas nicht signifikant zunahm. Darüber hinaus zeigte sich eine Abhängigkeit der CAR-Induktion im Herzen vom untersuchten Mausstamm (BALB/c bzw. C57BL/6). Die Analyse der genomischen DNA von 30 Enterovirus-positiven DCM-Patienten führte nicht zum Nachweis relevanter Mutationen mit einem Einfluss auf das Infektionsgeschehen. In der Zellkultur (HeLa) wurden schließlich verschiedene Faktoren (Infektion, Zelldichte, Zytokine) hinsichtlich ihrer Wirkung auf die CAR-Bildung untersucht – es ließ sich eine positive Korrelation zwischen Zelldichte und Rezeptor-Expression nachweisen. Die Behandlung von CVB3-infizierten Zellen mit Zytokinen führte nur im Fall von IFN-gamma zu einer signifikanten Reaktion in Form einer Transkriptionssteigerung. Auf Proteinebene war dieser Effekt jedoch nicht nachweisbar

Unsound Seeds

With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905. Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there

Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera

It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886

Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello

One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman

Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

In his celebrated essay on insanity in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1816), French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol marvelled at the earlier custom of allowing asylum inmates to attend theatrical productions at Charenton